Most studies on discourse markers implicitly assume that only one marker or discourse relation will occur in a sentence. In reality, more than one relation may hold between text spans and may be cued by multiple discourse markers. We describe here a method for hierarchically organising discoursemarkers. The hierarchies are intended for use by a generation system to enable the selection and plac...

An unprecedented combination of simula-tive and metaphor based reasoning about beliefs is achieved in an AI system, ATT-Meta. Much mundane discourse about beliefs productively uses conceptual metaphors such as MIND AS CONTAINER and IDEAS AS INTERNAL UTTERANCES, and ATT-Meta's metaphor-based reasoning accordingly leads to crucial discourse comprehension decisions. ATT-Meta's non-metaphorical mod...

In text, discourse markers signal the kind of coherence relation holding between adjacent text spans; for example, because, since; and for this reason are different markers for causal relations. Fo r any but the most simple applications of text generation, marker Selection is an important aspect of producing cohesive text. However, present systems use markers in fairly simplistic ways andcannot...

Human macrophages mediate the dissolution of elastic lamina by mobilizing tissue-destructive cysteine proteinases. While macrophage-mediated elastin degradation has been linked to the expression of cathepsins L and S, these cells also express cathepsin K, a new member of the cysteine proteinase family whose elastinolytic potential exceeds that of all known elastases. To determine the relative r...

Infections caused by Candida species other than Candida albicans are increasingly common, and decreased susceptibility to azoles has made them more difficult to treat. Since phagocytic killing is important in elimination of Candida infections, intracellular killing of fluconazole-resistant Candida glabrata, Candida krusei and Candida parapsilosis (four strains each) by voriconazole was investig...

BACKGROUND Cells of the innate immune system including monocytes and macrophages are the first line of defence against infections and are critical regulators of the inflammatory response. These cells express toll-like receptors (TLRs), innate immune receptors which govern tailored inflammatory gene expression patterns. Monocytes, which produce pro-inflammatory mediators, are readily recruited t...

The monocyte-derived macrophage (MDM), present at biomaterial implantations, can increase, decrease or redirect the inflammatory and subsequent wound healing process associated with the presence of a biomaterial. Understanding MDM responses to biomaterials is important for improved prediction and design of biomaterials for tissue engineering. This study analyzed the direct differentiation of mo...

The aim of the present study was to (1) evaluate the responsiveness of human mononuclear cells to lipoprotein lipase (LPL), as assessed by tumor necrosis factor-a (TNFa) production, during the process of differentiation of monocytes to macrophages, and (2) determine the mechanisms by which LPL exerts its effect on these cells. Treatment of human monocytes with purified endotoxin-free bovine LPL...

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the role of some discourse markers and the vocalic hesitation euh in a corpus of spoken human utterances collected with the RITEL system, an open domain and spoken dialog system. The frequency and contextual combination patterns of classical discourse markers and of the vocalic hesitation has been studied. This analysis highlights some specificities...

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has been in constant research for a number of years. The different parts of a text are called text spans. RST helps in organizing these text spans. These text spans are connected with each other by Discourse markers. In this paper, we are exploring the possibility of realizing some RST relations (CONTRAST, SEQUENCE and PARALLEL) from multi-nuclear sentences in ...